Field programmable analog array design for biomedical applications

Abstract

The acquisition and processing of biomedical signals are important steps for clinical applications and academic research. Clinical applications involves diagnosis of diseases and also control of the prothesis or functional electrical stimulation systems. On the other hand, in academical researches biomedical signals must be collected for generating data sets. For both of these two applications, most of the time data capturing device needs to get data from the patient or subject for a long period of time or multiple electrodes need to get data at the same time as long as the patient or subject carries on his/her daily life. In such cases mobile medical devices become important. To capture and process the medical signals, analog front-end circuits and analog processing circuits need to be implemented. Medical signals are the signals which have low amplitude and low frequency body signals. Capturing biomedical signals on a living tissue is highly noise sensitive. Because of these reasons, implementation and validation of these type of circuits are harder and more time consuming. Biomedical signals are usually processed using analog circuits such as instrumentation ampli ers, lters, RMS converters or recti ed average value converters. The design of such traditional circuits, however, especially during the validation phase, is time consuming. To reduce the time required for analog design, programmable devices become important. As a result, analog circuits can be designed to be programmable in a pre-de ned limited operation range. In this study, main building blocks such as Low Noise Ampli er, Filters, Analog to Digital Converter, Switch Logic and Programming Logic have build. Pre-layout and post-layout simulations of these main building blocks have done. By using these building blocks, CAB structures have designed by considering the general requirements of a biomedical signal processing.